


In love we disappear

by lotesse



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post Reichenbach, reparative reading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-09
Updated: 2012-01-09
Packaged: 2017-10-29 06:40:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm in ur movie, emphasizin ur hurt/comfort, queering ish up, and unrefridgeratin ur wimminz. Only, more nineteenth-century than that. Holmes, Irene, and Simza, post-Reichenbach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In love we disappear

Irene Adler wore scarlet, her smoky curls tumbling along her neck, outlined in the low light of the hall at the door. Holmes was quite sure that he was hallucinating. He'd known that the wound on his shoulder was growing worse, going septic; had smelled it, felt it trembling through his sinews as a fatal weakness. He ought to have died on the train to Reichenbach. Watson had saved him then. Watson was not present at the moment. Watson would be back in England by now, reunited with his new bride, perhaps even embarking on a second attempt at a honeymoon.

It was imperative that Watson be able to do so in safety, without interference from any remaining people of Moriarty's. And so Holmes had got as far Jougne before collapsing, blood loss and drug use and, before that, weeks of nervous expenditure and sleeplessness and obsessive intellectual work demanding their pound of flesh in payment for his sins. Nearly a hundred miles to the safety, the familiarity, of France. He spoke better French when he was tired, childhood inflections coming back more clearly without the interfering barrier of adult consciousness. A solitary room. Trying to re-bandage the wound, which had been retraumatized by the fall and his subsequent flight. He was not entirely sure that he was sane, and not laboring in the grasp of a paranoid delusion, but better safe than sorry. It was Watson's life in the balance. And Watson's happiness.

He damned himself for a fool for falling in love with a normal man, with normal manners and appetites, who could marry a girl in the received fashion and live normally with her forever more. His shoulder hurt abominably; without a doubt, it had become infected. He could feel fever gaining on him, but could not force himself to go for a doctor.

Cocaine alone no longer sufficed; he added morphia into the mix, injecting himself with blessed soft respite.

It was, therefore, without great surprise that he registered the hallucination. At least it was only Irene, clean and whole and luminous in the slanting late-afternoon light. He might have seen her corpse-like, or seen any number of infinitely less welcome persons. Irene only smiled sadly at him. “There you are, dear,” she said in her flat New Jersey drawl, and he let what he felt show in his eyes. No need to hide anything from a ghost. Certainly not from hers.

“Irene,” he said, and was appalled at the sound of his own voice. That was not what it ought to sound like.

“I had wondered where you'd got to,” she told him. “You hid your tracks very well. Walking upstream was a nice touch.”

“I do try,” he said, aiming for his usual clipped and confident tones, and falling short. She crossed the room, settling herself next to where he lay huddled on the bed. The whisper of her skirts was like a roaring in his ears. She smelled of gunpowder and lilies, and he thought of a stained handkerchief sinking under the waves of the English Channel.

She made a soft sound of consideration as she pushed back the coverlet and pulled his shirt back from the wound. “Hmm. This doesn't look good,” she said, brows furrowing slightly. “You haven't kept it clean.”

“I'm sorry,” he said, not attempting to evade her gaze.

“For not keeping your wound clean?”

“For getting you killed.” It was the first time he'd said it, and it left him horribly empty, hollowed out and echoing. Irene was his family every bit as much as Mycroft was, his sister in strangeness, one of the few people in the world he truly found worthy of full consideration. She had been so marvelously alive, while she had lived. It was so horribly ironic that she'd died.

She smirked. “You do not have enough fever for that. I am quite obviously not killed. Or are you dissatisfied with the data?” She reached out to touch Holmes' bloodied, dirtied cheek, and her hand was warm. He flinched back. “What?”

“You were killed. Because of me. Moriarty -”

She laughed, her warm contralto voice cradling the notes. “Sherlock,” she said, “you didn't get me killed. You trusted to a second-hand account of my demise? I should think you would at least have waiting to see the body for yourself.”

“Moriarty?” he said again, a question this time.

“Had me locked up,” she answered. “Under a false name, drugged. I escaped.” Her face flashed grim for a moment, before returning to its usual mocking softness. “The cost to myself was considerable.”

He didn't ask her what she'd paid. “But you're alive,” he said instead.

“Yes. It seems that we are both considerably more vital than has been reported. Chloroform wears off.”

She reached out to touch him again, pulling the basin and ewer closer, dabbing a corner of a red-monogrammed handkerchief in the water. He was wincing before she touched it to his mangled skin. She was right; it did seem to be coming away very dirty. He closed his eyes, losing himself in the wash of her touch.

Her next words, when at last she spoke, caused him to open them wide. “It was a hard trick, Sherlock. I believe you've hurt Doctor Watson rather dreadfully. The poor man looked pale as milk.”

The name acted on him as an electric shock. He jolted up in bed, although his shoulder protested the sudden movement with renewed agony. “You saw him?” he said, his breath coming somewhat short with emotion and physical pain. “Where? When?”

“Your brother took him back to England. To his wife. I saw him there, at your memorial service. He looked rather like a reanimated corpse, and we did not speak.”

Holmes sank back again into the grasp of the bed, his brief spurt of feeling and energy used up and gone. “His wife.”

Irene gave him his silence. At length he said, “It's not that I begrudge her, you know. Quite an extraordinary woman, Mrs. Mary Watson. Mycroft was utterly charmed by her, I could see it by the bit of softness still lingering in his expression. He used to look at me like that, when we were children. Sometimes he still does. And it's not that I begrudge Watson, either. Let the old cock be happy, by all means. It is just that I am not entirely sure, anymore, where exactly I come into things.”

His listener tightened her painted lips, rinsing her handkerchief without dropping her eyes from his. Without the aid of words, they sped through several of the inevitable phases of the discussion. “I cannot change it!” he expostulated, shrill with tension and frustration and shame.

“Then you will have to do what you can. You have no inherent right to him.”

“No,” he groaned, turning his face away, “only an inherent need.”

Eyes averted, he heard a jangle of metal, a light step across the threshold, and in alert response he tried to pull himself up and prepare. He did not have nearly the success in this endeavor that he might have wished.

Simza was there, hair tied back in an umber scarf, silver gleaming at her throat and a dangerous sorrow pulling at the corners of her mobile mouth. He would not hallucinate her; she had not died because of him. She was dressed for fighting, not fortune-telling. He could feel the numbing effects of morphine leaving him; again, he saw too much. Her jacket still was furrowed with the marks of Colonel Moran's near-misses.

She spoke, not to Holmes, but to Irene: “No one followed us.” There was something soft and rounded in her voice, that had not been there before, and he could not think of its name.

“Good,” Irene said. “I had not expected them to. They will find our trail eventually - but not for some time, I think.”

Sim came to the bed, standing beside Irene. When she saw Holmes, she breathed out a long, low breath. “You did find him, after all,” she said to Irene.

“I told you that I would.”

Sim leveled a considering look at Irene where she sat, skirts spread out in a cascade of scarlet silk as water dripped on them from her sodden handkerchief, blood and mess coating her little fingers. Then she looked down at Holmes, something inchoate in her dark eyes. At last she said, “Monsieur Holmes, ma frère est mort. I did not let them take his body, but I do not know if it alone can be the evidence you need.” 

He shook his head. “Did Colonel Moran escape?”

“Yes.”

“I cannot go back, then,” he said, doing his level best to disguise his voice in a merely musing tone. “I would not last a fortnight. And besides, Watson is with his wife.”

Irene's hand drifted up to comb through his tangled hair. “Poor dear. You didn't think he'd go through with it.”

Holmes shook his head, dislodging her hand. “I had no doubt of his resolve,” he said. Added, more softly, “Only of mine.”

He looked up at Sim, who had been prowling the room and checking the angles from window to bed, window to door, watchful as a tigress. The sharp lean lines of her body were indicative of a coiled tension, dynamic and ready to unfurl at the least provocation. He smiled wanly at her. “Je regrette la mort de ton frère, madame. Mais le diable est morte aussi, et nous sommes libérés. At least René died without staining himself further in that terrible game.”

She nodded, taking the words and giving nothing back. “What do you wish to do now?” she asked Irene, coming closer again and dropping down to sit beside her on the bed – to sit very close beside her indeed, Holmes noted. His breath caught as sensory information came crashing down on him: the exact distance and degree of the relation between their two bodies, the caressing pressure of the one feminine hand against the other, the swell of Irene's breasts against her bodice as she moved in infinitesimal erotic response. Simza's eyes dialated, and he knew she'd noticed that last item as well. Irene wanted her, and what Irene wanted she had. Very likely, she had done so already.

“Taken a new lover?” he asked Irene hoarsely, and Sim blushed a little. “A bit unconventional, don't you think?”

Irene only looked at him coolly. “What if I have?” She gave Sim a warmer look, reaching down to clasp her hand in a squeeze of reassurance and solidarity. “You mustn't mind Sherlock,” she said. “He's unlucky in love, and tends to get snippy when other people are more fortunate.”

“I won't,” Simza said, and, making sure that Holmes could see them fully, leaned in to press a slow, sensual, possessive kiss on Irene's mouth. Irene closed her eyes, melting back into the contact, and a curl of her hair fell down from its pins. She did not move to brush it back; her hands were still dirty. But she was vital and glowing when Sim pulled back at last, and she leaned forward to drop a last tiny kiss on the tip of Sim's nose.

“Congratulations, then,” he said, dry. “I can only hope and pray for the continued safety of whatever nation you ladies happen to inhabit at any given moment. It will become impossible to take that for granted the moment you arrive.”

Swallowing down his irritation and upset, he tried to shift the topic of conversation to something less painful. “I percieve that you are in France at the moment. For what purpose?”

“I suspected you of not being dead,” Irene replied. “Once I tracked you to Madame Simza, I knew you weren't. And I wanted to ensure that you would remain alive. After this,” she said more lightly, “I don't know where we shall go. What do you think of South Africa, Sim? I hear it's rather extraordinary.”

“I've never been there,” Simza said, leonine again, “and that is enough to render it attractive.” Her eyes, when they met Holmes', held a challenge. “And you, Monsieur Holmes? Where will you go?”

“He's going nowhere anytime soon,” Irene interjected, rising. “Sherlock, I'm going to go get some supplies – bandages for that shoulder, and some clean clothes for you. The usual style?”

“Your taste is impeccable, my dear,” he said. “And I cannot find it in myself at present to care.” She vanished with a rustle of silk, which made her comfortably corporeal, and not at all like an effervescing dream.

Simza did not follow her. “I really want to know,” she said.

Holmes did not try to hide his weariness. “Back to London, of course. My city is a cruel and jealous mistress. She requires a man of – thorough, expansive – vision. But not, I think, back to my – partner. And so, not back to Baker Street. Somewhere else, for a while. Until it does not – hurt – quite so much.”

“Don't leave him thinking you're dead,” Simza said, very serious, standing to check the window again. “Ne sois pas méchant. She did it to you, and it hurt. René did it to me, or tried to, and that hurt too. No one deserves that pain.”

“No,” Sherlock Holmes sighed, feeling the world grow sharp again all around him, with hard bright edges and shifting, bewildering patterns. Anesthetization had been a pleasant escape, for a time. But he'd used it all up, and knew it, and was resigned. “I'll send him – a sign, of some kind. That should be fine, as long as we do not try to speak.”

Eyes glowing like embers, Simza said, “He loves you.”

Again, Holmes answered in the affirmative. “But he _will not_ love me, you see, and I begin to believe that there may be nothing I can do about it. Better leave him to his happiness, and not get him caught up in madcappery and scandal.”

“You must do as you think best,” she said, and went down to find Irene.

Holmes saw the dust on the windowpanes, the marks of water on the sheets, the rhythmically-moving hands of the clock that stood in the corner. His shoulder hurt; he felt the throbbing of his own pulse, vital and disquieting. In that vivid, open, empty, silent place, he found himself thinking: it was not, all in all, so bad an ending.

Time to go on again.


End file.
